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- If you can make it now, you’ll make it anyhowYesterday
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My friend Samir Hunsi is pointing to a 2001 New Yorker article by James Surowiecki called, “Let the Bad Times Roll” about BusinessWeek & Fortune magazines being launched in 1929 and 1930 — and other successful ventures that started during economic recessions and depressions (3M, General Motors, Chase, Bell Telephone, I.B.M., Texas Instruments, General Electric, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems). He compares Fortune’s & BusinessWeek’s Depression Era launch with the boom-time launch of Industry Standard magazine that attracted a pile of startup capital and was thick with ads, but lasted only a few years.
Seems rather counter intuitive, doesn’t it?
However, Surowiecki notes that some companies succeed because of economic hard times rather than in spite of them. Why? Because the absence of money keeps startups from overexpanding and overreaching.
Quote:
“Companies are like human beings: hardscrabble beginnings beget hard-minded men. Consider little Andrew Carnegie, toiling as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory, or the young John D. Rockefeller, tending turkeys and salting away copper coins. Or think of any number of today’s moguls whose humble upbringing you ca
- ‘Social blah-blah, Social blah-blah’November 20
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As usual, Doc Searls has helped me clarify something that’s been bothering me lately.
Despite the fact that Hammock Inc. uses, and will continue to use, the term “social media marketing” to describe aspects of the services we offer clients, I’m expecting a major “bust” in the prefix “social-” in a couple of years.
My problem with the word “social-” in the context of online marketing and media is the same as my problem with the term “Web 2.0″: When something means anything, then it means nothing.
Personally, I prefer the terms “conversational media” or “conversation media” over the term “social media.” Conversation implies communication among individuals. To me, “conversation” captures the tools individuals now have to express themselves online: everything from blogs to photo-sharing and book-marking. I think the word “social” implies (at least to the marketers and media companies) that new forms of self-expression platforms are merely “the next” iteration of “audience” — they miss the transformative nature of individuals (customers) who are equal players in the marketplace.
Doc Searls is interested in this phenomenon as part of his work involving the concept of “vendor relationship management” — a mirror concept to the notion of “customer relationship management,
- Which Glue is stickier?November 20
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Via inquisitr.com, I learned that something called Yahoo! Glue has launched. According to Duncan Riley, Yahoo! says Glue was tested in India and was so successful, the U.S. version has been cranked up. I only mention this because last week I mentioned another product called Glue — watch this video to see what it does. Don’t confuse the two glues. The Yahoo! one is less than impressive upon my first glance (but then, I’m not a user of the service it appears to be knocking off.) On the other hand, as I mentioned in my previous post, I’m finding that my early sniffing of Glue (from the company, Adpaptive Blue) is making me high on it — and now there’s an iPhone App version.
I especially like Adpative Blue’s Glue because I finally get to explain what the term “semantic web” means with an easy-to-understand example of a service that begins to fulfill the
- Mark Cuban vs. the SECNovember 20
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I’ve been traveling and meeting for the past three days, so I’ve been catching up on some news reading this evening. I must say, I’m quite confused by the whole controversy surrounding the SEC suing Mark Cuban.
First, Why does the Southeastern Conference have jurisdiction over an owner of an NBA team? (Oh, wait. Not that SEC. Nevermind.)
Second shocker: How could Mamma.com be worth enough for Cuban to lose $750,000 by dumping just 6% of the company’s stock? I say that because I’ve never heard of Mamma.com.
Third and most importantly, Why is the SEC wasting time on Cuban when they should be out rounding up Wall Street executives who threw the U.S. economy off a cliff by packaging and selling worthless crap while calling it Triple-A Shinola?
The NBA has fined Cuban more than the SEC is suing him for — he typically just pays the fine, matches it with a contribution to charity, and keeps on saying whatever he was saying before they fined him. He never actually fights the NBA. The NBA, however, doesn’t have the ability to turn their complaints over to a “criminal” division.
I apologize for bringing nothing of any significance to this issue.
I just couldn’t let the event pass without mentioning it, as
- LIFE photo archive hosted by GoogleNovember 18
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I’m in the midst of a great meeting (really, no kidding) so I don’t have time to give this LIFE photo archive hosted by Google a proper shout-out. I’ll try to later. Very cool.
Later: Staci Kramer at PaidContent.org has the details about the LIFE photos indexed by Google. Says Staci, “Time Inc. describes it as ‘one of the largest scanning projects ever’ with millions of images available today and the rest on the way. Some caveats: The images are free for personal, non-commercial use with Time Inc. retaining the copyrights and ownership—and its commercial syndication business. The archive only includes work that Time Inc. owns, so many images that have appeared in the magazine will not show up.
(via: waxy.org links)
